Tales from Delta - Finding Happiness

March 2067. After his encounter with Blade, Jorma takes refuge at Delta Team, where he meets the unit commander - Tiger Sambiong - and his second-in-command Cyphr. While trying to get into a protection program, Jorma learns more about Tiger and about the possibility for a mutant like him to achieve happiness, even in the face of such an unforgiving world.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

The room was cozier than he had expected. It almost didn’t look like a cell. The lights were warm instead of the usual, nauseating bluish tint he had grown accustomed to. The walls were of an acceptable shade of ocher, so distant from the sterile hospital white or dull gray he pictured in his mind. Even the table he was sitting at was of some sort of tastefully made wood, instead of cheap plastic or cold metal. There was also a small bookcase and a couple posters taped to the wall, plus what seemed like an erotic calendar – partially obscured and censored with various postcards and smiley stickers.

He couldn’t make heads or tails of it. The cell looked more like a proper house than his own shack at the outskirts of Shard, truth be told. He felt like he had fallen into a weird parallel reality, where everything he was told in the past had been a lie. Yet...

“Here, have some coffee. I’m sorry, but we can’t serve you alcoholic drinks.”

He turned around to meet the owner of that voice. A tall, slender human girl, with short, pale blond hair. Her eyes were a weird shade of amber and looked somehow artificial, with their connection to two thin, black data bands, surrounded by faintly glowing red lights. Despite those features, coupled with an electronic earpiece, he was still sure she was at least mostly biological. Gynoids tended to be indistinguishable from human beings, because having them show their mechanisms weirded out many potential customers – for most, it would cause them to fall deeply into the uncanny valley. No, those had to be prosthetic implants, not unlike his own hand. The smoking gun, though, was her arms. Ceramic plates, masterfully crafted together with rubber, plastic, and metal, embellished with a soft ivory tint and a rose pattern engraved on the material. Very light, but also quite durable. They were a premium model on the market, and he knew a few people who had bought them in the past. Nothing his unsophisticated, rough, rusty replacement hand could compare to.

He thanked her with a nod, snatched the mug from her hands, kept his eyes on her as she took her seat in front of him, at the other side of the table.

“Mr. Jorma Vekkala, or?”

“That would be correct, yes.”

She opened an old-fashioned physical folder, pulling out some papers printed with smudged ink. There was no computer or terminal in the room, which greatly surprised Jorma when he was first brought in. That precinct looked like something out of an old movie, except it was real. He looked at the girl again. She was very young, maybe in her late teens or early twenties, and was wearing what looked like a blue, sleeveless uniform, with a red triangle logo on the left side of her chest – the same red triangle that was watching them from one of the walls, in all its painted glory. Instinctively, Jorma looked around for cameras – there had to be hidden cameras, or even visible ones, to record the conversation if nothing else. It would be perfectly legitimate, but his fear of being on camera wasn’t easy to stifle. He had gotten used to keeping the lowest profile possible for more than a year, trying not to stand out too much – which was much easier said than done for a gray shark fishface with a robotic hand.

“I’m Cyphr Wolfchild, Commander Sambiong’s attendee. He’ll be here in a minute or two. His commute hasn’t been the easiest since he moved in with his wife. Just between us, I still think she’s an attention-seeking brat, at least as much of one as I am, but if they’re happy together, I’m happy for them.”

Jorma blinked a couple times, trying to elaborate on that sentence.

“You said... wife? That furry sc... I mean Commander Sambiong is... married? With another mutant? Or... or is she a human?”

The girl named Cyphr crossed her prosthetic arms, leaned forward, lowered her head to look at Jorma’s curious eyes.

“Have you been living under a rock? It was THE news piece of the ’60s – the first ever legal marriage between a human and a beastkin. The media buzzed about it for weeks – hell, I have been interviewed two or three times myself, by journalists wanting to know some spicy details about them! Even Leo Verrand, the star journo of The Clover himself, came here with his whole troupe. And all for one mixed wedding! I mean, I was the commander’s best woman, so I think it makes sense, but...”

These words seemed to breach into Jorma’s psyche more than she expected. He stared at her with surprise, a wild, flabbergasted look bouncing around his stupefied pupils. Cyphr noticed it, deciding not to press the matter further.

“I hope the accommodation is to your liking. We can’t offer you a suite or anything fancy – this is a military base, after all – but it isn’t that bad, or?”

“It’s surprisingly cozy for a cell.”

Cyphr smiled. She and her girlfriend had spent a good month helping Commander Sambiong decide on the decorations of what amounted to “the guest room” in the Delta Team base, with a budget so tight it felt like a challenge essay for an economy grad student. They scoured second hand shops and flea markets to retrieve as many pieces of furniture at the lowest price possible, on top of looking around for stuff that was thrown away or left at the edge of the street after the previous owner moved out of their flat. With a bit of creativity, they managed to find almost everything they needed, and at a decent quality too. She made sure to “test” the bed frame and mattress with Lejl before delivering it to the Delta base, as it would have been extremely embarrassing if it just broke in half the first time it was used by someone slightly overweight. The test had been very daunting, but the bed passed it with flying colors, both in resistance and comfort. Since it managed to withstand their – let’s call it – joint performance, it would have been almost impossible to thrash by any normal means. Of course, they didn’t share details of their testing methodology with the commander, as he would have most likely deemed it less than appropriate.

In contrast to the effort of finding enough pieces of furniture, filling the bookshelf and decorating the walls with posters had been relatively easy, as many libraries around the city had crates of unused volumes and old scrolls that were just waiting to be pulped. They were glad to give them a second life instead. However, the nude calendar filled with photos of rookie top models, taken out of a special issue of Lust, was somewhat of a contentious choice. Command Sambiong was absolutely, positively against it, while Lejl argued that people had urges and that there was nothing wrong with it. They stonewalled each other for a while, with Cyphr being scared of openly siding with one or the other – supporting the commander was the logical choice, but would have caused her a ferocious migraine in dealing with an enraged Lejl at home, while siding with Lejl would have caused the commander to chastise her at work. Thus, she proposed a middle ground both of them reluctantly agreed to – keep the calendar, but censor it with stickers and postcards. That bizarre agreement resulted in said calendar remaining frozen in time in the month of July, with the figure of a young woman with cat ears and tail provocatively winking at the imaginary viewer. In hindsight, she really should have had the balls to contradict Lejl and endure her angry retorts, as that calendar looked severely out of place, no matter how objectively hot that “Myadeline Heargreaves” woman was. She took a mental note of hiding it as soon as the Vekkala affair was over.

“Glad you think it’s fine. We renovated it a couple months ago. Before, it looked too much like a hospital room. Everyone hated it, including the commander. We just took the first chance we had to redesign it from the ground up.”

Jorma looked at her again, at her elegant mechanical arms, at her body that told a story of abuse. She had probably suffered just as much as him, if not moreso. Yet, that girl seemed cheerful enough, all things considered. Meanwhile, he couldn’t stop thinking about his lost hand. He clenched his mechanical fist. The phantom pain was still there. He felt as if his muscles, his tendons hadn’t been severed, as if they continued to live inside that artificial extension. How could a human girl endure that better than him? Was he really an evolutionary failure, as Go had often said? Those thoughts had been haunting his mind for such a long time that he had eventually convinced himself they had to be true.

“Everything fine, Mr. Vekkala?”

“H... huh, yes? I guess so. I was just wondering... you know... why? Why do you people do this? Sheltering mutants, helping them start a new life, protecting them. This is stupid. We’re all… uh, freaks. All of us. Disgusting hybrids created by corpos for money. No, uh, wait, it’s not stupid. It’s just unexpected, right? Because if I turned myself in to the police or the army, I’d be sold to the fish market in no time. Boost the Butcher, ya get me? He’s still infamous among us fishfaces.”

Cyphr looked at the wall clock. Despite what she told to the sharkman, she knew Commander Sambiong wouldn’t show up for another twenty minutes or so. He had texted her before that his train was late and that she should try to keep Jorma at ease as long as possible, until his eventual arrival. She stared back at the gray shark curled into a ball of pain and panic in front of her. Merely mentioning Boost the Butcher had caused him to reflexively shiver. She proffered her hand, grabbed Jorma’s biological one, put her other hand above it. The sharkman seemed to calm down a bit, finding the strength to raise his gaze. Cyphr smiled.

“I asked the same question to the commander, once.”

**

Tiger was anxious. He wasn’t cut out to be a leader. He wasn’t cut out to be anything. He should have died. It would have been better if he did, back in Euterpe. But no, apparently fate had other plans for him. He was a mutant – property, he thought – and he couldn’t choose to dispose of himself. That’s what father had told him, over and over. Sambiong, you aren’t human. Sambiong, you don’t have rights. Sambiong, you are the inferior specimen. Sambiong. Sambiong. Sambiong. SAMBIOOOOOONG!

Tiger shook his head. That scream. His father’s scream, just before Tiger had left him to die inside the laboratory. It was still haunting him. Still piercing his brain with its loud, desperate plea for help. He had ignored it, he had left him to rot, to blow up with the whole structure. He ran away like a coward. A patricidal coward. SAMBIOOOOONG! He shook his head again. He couldn’t let go of it. Father was dead. And it was his fault. His fault alone. When the army found him, he almost felt relieved. He was going to join Shabeel and his father. He had accepted his fate.

Yet, instead of executing him on the spot, as he wished for, as he thought he deserved, the UK army made him an offer – relocate to Britain and become the face of a new unit. They were wary of him, and many of the soldiers who interacted with him were taken aback by his feline features and body shape. There was fear in their eyes. Disgust. Tiger, just called Sambiong at the time, knew it. They thought he was a monster, something they could have easily terminated on the spot. He would have liked to tell themplease, just end my suffering.

But, somehow, he knew he couldn’t.

He couldn’t waste Shabeel’s gift. He couldn’t waste his brother’s sacrifice. He had to live on, even if that meant slavery. But, much to his surprise… he learned that he wasn’t just property. That they weren’t property. The Morelli laws, the same laws his father kept on citing to bend him to his will, had already been repealed twenty years prior. Mutants like him, like them, had human rights. They were people, not objects. People. That discovery made him livid. He had accepted his fate as a commodity for such a long time, only to suddenly be told he had lived a lie. Shabeel’s death wasn’t an accidental destruction of property. It was plain, voluntary murder.

SAMBIOOOOONG!

The moment he realized it, not even his father’s scream could defuse his anger. The thought made his blood boil, made him accept that deal without a second thought. When asked for a first name, he disparagingly chose “Tiger”, because that’s what he was – nothing but a random feline, not worthy of being identified by any other moniker. Thus, he became Tiger Sambiong – which probably made things even more awkward – and he accepted being called like that. Tiger. A common name indicating a beast. Like calling a dog “dog” or a cat “cat”. Yet, that was his worldview – he deserved to be seen as an indistinct gear in the system, because he was a nobody. And there he was, barely three months later, browsing through curricula and assorted scraps of paper, trying to find other members for that new unit of his.

He wasn’t too convinced by it all, at first. It felt like some weird political ploy to show people that the government was doing something about the non-negligible amount of pseudohumans residing in Europe, and especially in the UK. But it started making much more sense when he first heard of Boost the Butcher. His real name was Heinz-Harald Boost, and he was a highly-decorated, ambitious army general who made the news for his impressive streak of mutant kills back in the late ’30s. Every time a crime concerning mutants surfaced, he took care of it with brutal efficacy, by killing the pseudohuman in question without even giving them the chance to parlay. That was before the Morelli laws were repealed in 2041. At that time, he was around twenty-five years old and was notorious for having slaughtered no less than twenty pseudohumans in the span of two years. When the repeal came into effect, Boost should have been tried for aggravated serial homicide, but – since his actions weren’t considered a crime when they happened, and the repeal was not fully retroactive – he not only came out of the ordeal unscathed, he was even promoted. And, from promotion to promotion, he ended up occupying one of the highest seats in the military at the age of forty-seven. It wasn’t a good look for the army, but the ruling party didn’t exactly hide a twisted appreciation for Boost’s brutal methods. If anything, they were covertly supporting him, covering his tracks whenever a pseudohuman was found accidentally beaten and broken near the riverside, or died in prison after having “slipped” and hit their head. Repeatedly, apparently. With several broken bones and contusions. But since they were pseudohumans, usually societal outcasts and sometimes even drug addicts, they had to be the bad guys, and the army had to be correct in disposing of them.

Delta Team was founded as a sort of check and balance to counter that sentiment. The name sounded as if it had been chosen at random, but it actually had a surprising amount of thought behind it – in math, a capital delta was the symbol for “discriminant”. Just as the math discriminant was the authority that decided whether or not a second-grade equation had real solutions, Delta Team would have been the arbiter on all mutant crimes, acting both as a quickly deployable spec ops unit and as a first emergency care provider for pseudohumans in trouble. The politician who proposed this naming, a retired physicist who surely had the time of his life coming up with that justification, minted a suitable backronym too – Demihuman Location, Treatment and Assistance Team. In the absence of any better names, or the will to keep discussing a subject that interested just a tiny sliver of their electorate, the parliamentary commission ran with it. So, officially, Boost the Butcher’s jurisdiction had now an opposing force. Unofficially, he was still pretty much free to do as he pleased, but at least everything was now balanced from an outside perspective.

All that was left was merely the unpleasant task of building the actual team, with only one member set in stone: Commander Sambiong himself. The reason being, if a human wasn’t willing to work with a mutant as their leader, they were probably not suitable for dealing with mutants at large. Sambiong was also the one mutant the UK government had any connection with. Since he was originally conceived as a war machine, however, he was deemed good enough to be a central figure for the new division. Thus, there he was, sitting at his desk, inside some nondescript gray building, waiting for potential candidates to arrive. He had already interviewed some of them that day, and it was the same story every time: once they found out their prospective commander was a big feline hybrid, they either excused themselves and walked away, or simply did so without saying a word. He didn’t have a good feeling about this next one either, but in the end, it was better to give it a proper shot than to let his worries and trauma consume him.

He heard the door unlocking, while still going through the documents. He didn’t lift his gaze, feigned disinterest for the newcomer, waiting for her to say the first word. In the meanwhile, he kept his eyes on her resume, full of details that sounded pretty unreal, even to someone like him. He heard the door closing, then nothing else. He felt the presence of the other person in the room. At least she didn’t leave already, he thought. Thus, he finally looked away from his papers to turn his attention to her, to that Cyphr Wolfchild whose biographical information seemed straight out of a hard-boiled cyberpunk mafia story from the old ’70s. He gasped upon finally seeing her in person, though. In front of him stood a girl almost as tall as him, with piercing amber eyes, peculiar data bands than ran down her cheeks, and what looked like an earpiece with an antenna on the right side of her head. She was quite thin and slender, wearing a black tanktop, blue jeans and a pair of sneakers. And she had no arms. Neither biological, nor prosthetic. Two remarkably thick scars at the shoulder level were all that was left of her upper appendages, showing beyond reasonable doubt that she wasn’t born like that.

Her limbs had been amputated.

Tiger’s heart skipped a beat. He didn’t know how to react. He had never met a human being like her. The girl named Cyphr didn’t remark on his discomfort though, nor did she seem to feel unwelcome. She simply pulled the chair back with surprising agility and sat on it.

“You’re Commander Sambiong, or?”

Tiger was taken aback by the bizarre creature in front of him, not knowing where to direct his gaze without looking nervous or freaked out. He decided to focus on her eyes, the very same eyes that were scanning him in return, from head to toe. Only then did he notice the dark bags around her eyes, the reddish swell that underscored them. She looked very tired, and had very likely been crying not long ago. But crying for what? He kept his attention on her face, to avoid looking at her stumps. Those mounds of scarred flesh were making him tremendously uncomfortable, for some reason. Then, he realized something, something he couldn’t believe at first, something that contradicted his very principles: He had just done to her what humans had always done to him – react to an unfamiliar sight with repulsion and disgust. He felt an intense wave of shame traveling through his body. That discomfort… was that how humans felt when looking at him?

“Listen, if you aren’t the commander, can you go call him? I... really want to talk about my application for Delta Team.”

He snapped out of that poisonous state of mind, out of that trance that was devouring him from the inside out. He drew a deep breath, as logic once again seized control of his brain, forcing his instincts to shut the hell up.

“I am, indeed, Commander Tiger Sambiong. My apologies, I... was deep in thought. Reading your resume and such. Cyphr Wolfchild, correct?”

The girl looked deathly tired, as if she hadn’t slept in days. Yet, there was a spark of confidence in her demeanor that was impossible not to notice. She shrugged, her shoulders moving up with her stumps, in a way Tiger couldn’t really avoid looking at. Then, he suddenly averted his gaze, turned it down to his desk. Cyphr chuckled.

“You shouldn’t be ashamed, Commander. You are not the first to be grossed out by my body, nor will you be the last. ’Sides, I almost had a heart attack too, when I saw you. That’s no fursuit, or?”

A fursuit. Tiger couldn’t help but smirk at that remark.

“No, it’s the real deal. One hundred percent natural mane. Wanna check?”

“Nah, I’m good. Not here to pet an oversized, talking feline, even if that means I don’t get the job. But, just out of curiosity, would you purr if I did?”

“Afraid not. My larynx isn’t built like that.”

“That’s a shame. I’ve always wanted to hear a big cat purr.”

Somehow, the situation had been defused and the tension had fallen down to acceptable levels. Tiger had begun to feel a strange sense of commonality with the weird girl in front of him. Both of them were, by some definition of the term, freaks. Or, simply put, people that society didn’t understand, and didn’t want to understand. He looked at her file once more. Cyphr Wolfchild, eighteen years old. German. Never completed her formal education, dropped out of her gymnasium before getting her Abitur. No degrees, no academic results, no previous experience in law enforcement or military, not even as an intern. Used to live with her mother until just one year prior, and was now renting a room in a bed-and-breakfast in New Langdon. Nothing remarkable or stand-out so far. On paper, she looked a dull case of societal failure. Yet...

He turned to the second page, the results of the assessment test. She had aced the written test, answering every example scenario with knowledge that could only have been gained on the field, or witnessed firsthand. And the physical test...

He turned page once more. She had ranked seventh in a pool of fifty participants, most of which were completely able-bodied, only being outplaced by a handful of muscle mountains that couldn’t be bested with agility alone. Those who had witnessed her in action described her as a deadly dancing butterfly. He looked at the file, he looked at her. Was that really the same annoyed, sleep-deprived girl sitting in front of him?

“You scored very well in the admission test. Third in the theory exam and seventh in the practical, for a global first position. This, despite having no military background. May I ask you how...”

“Ever heard of Der Wolf? She’s my mom. I’ve lived with her since I was nine. She taught me everything I know.”

Tiger looked at her quizzically. He had never heard of this dervolf, though admittedly, his long confinement in Branch 70X meant that he had almost no exposure to the outside world. Cyphr seemed to notice his confusion, but just shrugged.

“She’s a mercenary and a bounty hunter. A very successful one, too. Lately, she started dabbling with Crossbones, that bunch of losers dressed in weird skull-themed armor. Maybe you’ve seen some of them around.”

Tiger sighed. Of course he had seen them. One of those self-proclaimed Crossbones mercs, some bloody idiot with a thick foreign accent, had publicly insulted him not even a couple days prior, calling him furry scum and other not-so-pleasant epithets. They had met at the supermarket during their respective lunch breaks, with Tiger dressed in full military camo, and the merc donning his dumb-looking skeleton suit. They had interacted only due to a stupid misunderstanding at the moment of paying, with the merc and Tiger literally switching places right before the checkout. Tiger had endured the insults without replying, as he believed that no good would have come from arguing with a guy dressed in a Halloween costume (incidentally, he had only recently learned about Halloween at the integration course he was following every week to learn more about the world outside of the laboratory). Staying silent had likely not been a smart move, but it was the move that saved his afternoon mood.

“I’ve had the displeasure to. But okay, this checks out. Now, more importantly... why do you want to join Delta Team? What are your feelings towards mutants and pseudohumans?”

She drew a deep breath. Tiger could see her restraining herself, forcing herself not to cry. He couldn’t immediately understand what could’ve caused cause that reaction, the question seemed to be a fairly standard one.

“You were there, or? When everything exploded, back in... in Euterpe.”

SAMBIOOOOOONG!

That scream once again echoed through his mind, tore it apart. Tiger buried his head between his hands. His heartbeat suddenly accelerated, the image of Mayer with his broken leg burned into his cornea. Calm down, Tiger. You are here now, not there. It’s the past. Calm down. He repeated it silently, like a mantra for several times, until the pained voice of his father stopped hurting him.

“... Commander Sambiong?”

“I’m... fine. Thanks. I’m just... it’s still too fresh in my memory. But, yes, I was there. What of it?”

“My mother was there too... but she never came back. They are still looking for her, but they say she’s probably dead. Currently, she’s classified as M.I.A.”

Cyphr finally let go of her tears, allowed them to flow down her cheeks. She felt pain, physical pain, every time she thought of Euterpe, or her mother. Tiger knew how she felt, or at least believed he knew. He had murdered his father in the same place, the father whose scream woke him up every night. He saw that, now. They were birds of a feather. The commonality he felt, the connection, was all too real. The two of them were not so different. Cyphr’s voice became louder, winning over her sadness.

“I want to know the truth! I want to find the bastard who caused all of this! All acts and documents are redacted, but maybe, as a member of Delta Team, I...”

“I understand. Indeed, there’s a chance we will get access to that intel. I respect your sincerity, but if this is all–”

“Why are you doing this, Commander Sambiong?”

Tiger jolted back in his seat.

“Excuse me?”

“I’ve read about you a bit. A mutant created in... in that place. Used as a weapon for his whole life. Why are you working with us humans? Why haven’t you... I don’t know, gone rogue or joined some terrorist organization? Why have you... agreed to hunt your kin?”

Tiger replied with a sad smile.

“Because I don’t want them to suffer as much as I did. Because, if I find them first, I can give them a chance to build a new life and restart. Because I don’t want another brother to die thanks to my inaction. And, more importantly...”

He slumped in his chair, without ever averting his slit-like gaze from the girl in front of him.

“...because I want them to find happiness, despite being the monsters they – we – are.”

**

Jorma stared at Cyphr, his eyes wide open. He couldn’t believe someone so idealistic still existed in that world. In his days as a Fishface, it was always eat or be eaten – no room for helping others, if you wanted to climb the ranks. That story had to be a lie to some degree, it sounded too good to be true. Cyphr smiled, almost to reassure him that it was the truth, that she hadn’t deceived him.

A metallic noise interrupted their staring contest, the sound of the door opening right behind them. Jorma turned around to see a tall tigerman in a military camo suit walk in, nearly out of breath.

“Sorry for the delay. UK railways are what they are. I used to live just two blocks away, but my wife and I decided that a small house with garden would have suited our future children better. Good luck finding one of those near the city center.”

Cyphr patted him on the back, winked with a sly grin.

“Aaand that’s one advantage I have over you, Sir! No risk of children!”

“Get back to me on that in two years, I’m sure I’ll be an honorary uncle by then. Multiple times, even. You and that crazy girlfriend of yours are full of surprises.”

“Oh, really? Be careful not to end up with a litter of little cubs instead, Commander.”

They started chuckling, bumped fists with each other. Tiger then proffered his hand to the sharkman, his voice sounding both firm and soft at the same time.

“Jorma Vekkala?”

“Th... that would be me, yes.”

“Good. We’ll start with a little bit of paperwork first...”

Tiger sat at the table, started browsing the same printed documents Cyphr prepared. He moved his left hand as if to grab a mug, only for his fingers to get lost in the emptiness, no beverage to be found where in the place his morning automatism drove them. Cyphr stood up and headed for the kitchenette, before Tiger could even ask her.

“Coffee with or without milk today?”

“Make it a cappuccino, thanks.”

Jorma could only blankly stare at the feline officer that had just arrived. A mutant, like him. With a human wife. Living in a nice house with a garden, on the outskirts of the city. Talking about children. Working a respectable job. Having human friends that didn’t consider him a monster. Jorma closed his eyes, sobbed softly. Sambiong had it. He had everything Jorma had ever wanted from his life. But if that feline managed to do that, to achieve that much despite being a mutant, then... maybe, just maybe, he could too? Suddenly, he burst into tears, started to let it all out.

“T... Tara...”

Maybe, there really was a future for him with her, with her and her little brat. His Tara and him... happy? He couldn’t, he wouldn’t hope for such a good ending, he didn’t do anything to deserve it.

“S-Sambiong... I... I...”

Tiger hugged him, hugged him firmly.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. We’ll find a way out for you, don’t worry. It will be hard, at first, but...”

Jorma stopped listening, instead just losing himself in the warm, reassuring hug of that weird, cat-like mutant.

And for the first time in months, he finally managed to smile.